A colleague of mine just presented at the next 2011 conference held in Berlin in May 2011, hosted by SinnerSchrader.
Jochen Adler, a Business Analyst, and a passionate speaker is talking about the challenges and options for global players to use Social Media internally.
By looking at Deutsche Bank AG, one of the biggest advisory banks in the world, he is first of all asking the question, why is it so hard and difficult to engage and what are the roadblocks to make micro blogging a success.

First of all, teamwork cant be done as it has been done in the past due to vitality and being a global organisation.

It’s hard to raise awareness and get connected with the co workers especially in global line organisations or large size projects.

Micro blogging can solve this issues, by raising the question “What are you working on ?” instead of Twitter asking “Whats happening ?”

So what are the current stats of Deutsche Bank’s micro blogging service ‘The Wire’ as of may 2011.
There are 7.713 Users on the platform, 4.324 of those have posted at least one update and by average around 750 posts are published on a business day.

A special hashtag (#Wirewin) has evolved to recognise a good answer to a specific question.

So what are the roadblocks to make micro blogging a success in a global organisation.

1) casual vs. work: There is professional reputation to loose.
2) US vs. Germany: Cultural differences between countries and various levels of adoption.
3) Bosses Blogging: Employees are checking whether their bosses are blogging and are looking for guidance whether blogging can be perceived as a time waster. If the boss blogs, employees will blog too.
4) Regulation: information provisioning is regulated and the sender has the responsibility to decide.

What are the possibilities and for the future.
Micro blogging has a great potential to change the way we work as it becomes the memory of the organisation.
And if all of your platforms  are able to tweet as you work with them (bug fixed -> tweet; document uploaded -> tweet; answer a question -> tweet aso.)

Bottom Line:
Its hard to establish a micro blogging service, how ever, it can be done, and if you are successful a better sharing and communication culture can be established with great possibilities to generate.

What experiences did you make in your organisation?

After being accepted for the PMforum conference (organized by GPM) later this year in Berlin (26th to 27th of October) I got asked by the organizers whether I would be willing to participate in a video to talk 10 minutes about my presentation. After accepting that, Andreas Heilwagen (Projekt Management Beratung) , one of the visible  Project Managers throughout Germany and beyond, contacted me to discuss the details.

After providing the details to him and some prior chats we had a one hour session recording the talk on skype. See the outcome below or on PM 10 Minutes.

What is the Polygon:

• A model to identify and visualize complexity of process projects
• A model to inherit the risk resulting out of the complexity
• A model to identify active mitigation measures to minimize the risk

All the details please find in the video as well as in the new book on that topic to be released soon.

Currently I am preparing a presentation for this years interPM conference in Glashuetten (small little town close to Frankfurt). The topic is something about Risk / Complexity and how to identify, measure, manage and communicate it.

How ever, as I perceive, Germany is still a little behind using real time social media as part of their events like conferences. You do not see many people in the audience with a Laptop, iPhone or other devices to real time blog or tweet (using twitter) about the presentation or event. There are some geeks out there doing this. Thomas Witt (@thomas_witt, blog at www.thomas-witt.com) is one of them as he recently tweeted from the TEDx event in Berlin (#TEDxBerlin).

So I am thinking of making twitter in integral part of my presentation and my slides. What I am thinking of is using that kind of approach and functionality for …

• Receive feedback from the audience based on a predefined hashtag
• Real time voting and polls
• Auto Twitter the slide and notes you are currently presenting on

All this of course is dependent on three things …

• Public WiFi or LAN in the room and Laptop connected to it
• Critical Number of people in the room with a mobile device like Laptop, iPhone, RIM and others
• and of course the Plug-ins for Powerpoint

I can’t really influence the first two. Hope is my only method :-) How ever, the last bullet I am able to influence and therefore I was looking for tools and plug-ins to be able to make that functionality part of my presentation. So I stumbled upon the plug-ins from Timo Elliot, an evangelist for SAP. He has developed some pretty neat tools and Shockwave Plug-Ins for Powerpoint that allow you to exactly to do what I was looking for.

1) Receive feedback from the audience based on a predefined hashtag

The plug-in provides the capability to provide real time tweets based on hash tags (#) and usernames (@), you can configure the format (bubbles or boxes), the refresh rate in seconds, special custom feeds (great for search terms outside the average hash tag approach and you can manual refresh the page.

So if you introduce a specific hash tag at the beginning of your presentation (eg. #TKOinterPM, make sure you make it shorter than I just did) and let people tweet during your presentation you can show the audience what the audience has tweeted about your presentation.

That’s how the page could look like (used the #pmot hashtag for ‘Project Managers on Twitter’)

2) Real time voting and polls

You can ask specific questions and have people vote for one or the other answer. If you really want to have your ass kicked ask how the audience liked your presentation. It could go from ‘lame’ via ‘average’ to ‘autostanding’ or whatever you choose. Here is how it works:

Choose a hashtag for the voting like #voteTJKinterPM and than ask the audience to put a number up in front their tweet representing the vote. Like ‘1 i really like your presentation #voteTJKinterPM’ or ‘1 #voteTJKinterPM’. Wait a couple of seconds depending on the internet speed and show up the slides with the results.

Here is how the result could look like:

3) Auto Twitter the slide and notes you are currently presenting on

If you want to tweet life updates of your presentation, you just need to put <twitter> and </twitter> in your notes page before and after the text you want to be tweeted on twitter. This should be either a small summary of your page or the key facts. You can configure that functionality by connecting to your twitter account and provide the hash tag you want to be connected with your tweets. That allows you to use different hash tags for different presentations with the same slides.

Here is how the configuration screen looks like:

Summary

What a fantastic way to interact with your audience and use the real time social media functionality that changed our world of communication and interaction with others in the recent past. What i explained in this post is one way how YOU could enhance this ‘Game Changer’ to enhance your way of communicating with your audience. Go ahead and try.

Downloads and further information (Thanks to Timo Elliot):

• More detailed Instructions you can find here.
• The Powerpoint Plug-in can be downloaded here.

What do you think? How will these options enhance your way of communication and interaction with your audience? Please comment !

What a great idea I have seen today on the web!

Geof Lory explains in his blog post how he used Lego Blocks to build a GANTT Chart to represent in a different way the interdependencies of his project.

GANTT Chart built with Lego

Here are the steps he used to get to the result:

1. Idea was born
2. Quick trip to Legoland
3. Spent 100$
4. Everybody told to use the tools provided and start building
5. Go experimenting
6. No limitations (just restrictions set by the tools provided)

Here are the guidelines / rules used to build the GANTT Chart

1. Bottom Layer (yellow): Time line, every block is a week and date is written on the block
2. Red Layer: Incremental iterations / sprints
3. Green Layer: new functionality being added to production (Release)
4. Other colours: Activities (Design, Development, Testing etc.) are represented
5. People: Different User groups adding to the functionality

What a fantastic way to represent your time line, pieces of work and activities leading to it. And another tool to build a team as everybody is involved to build and maintain it. And beside that, you will build momentum and recognition as you might be the first on using it in your environment.

So go and find a sponsor for the blocks and start building on top of that idea.

I have been on twitter for the last 2 weeks.

After a friend of mine said to me, that twitter is a great resource and great articles and pearls are referred to, I started to create an account, loaded the great ‘Tweetie 2′ Application onto my iPhone and gave it a go. I looked for public known PMs within twitter, like the ‘pmstudent‘ or ‘CorneliusFicht‘ aka Cornelius Fichtner and started to build my ‘network’ on Twitter. I started following Project Managers and accounts from Companies. During that time Twitter announced the ‘list’ feature, where you are able to categorize Twitter accounts into lists so that you can build areas of interests. So it started to set-up a list which follows great individuals around project management (you can see it on the right side in my blog; an example for the real time web, where all new tweets are published at the very second they are visible on twitter).

So after two weeks I almost posted 200 tweets, more or less in the area of project management, and I do have around 80 followers. I guess most of the followers are not organic, they follow me because of specific key words I have used in my tweets. Those guys are following a couple of thousand accounts or even more, and I am not sure how you can follow more than appr. 200 people. I would call that information overload.

But the best part are the tweets that I am seeing every day (I check them while I am on the train in the morning and in the evening while going to work and back home; wondering sometimes how I get there as I am fully focused on my iPhone :-) )

Out of all these tweets I am getting I do tag the ones as favourites that are focusing on my key areas of interest like ‘pearls in project management‘, ‘social media and project management‘, ‘How to use agile approaches in your projects‘ and other special topics.

As I have written 2 books in the recent past and another one due to be published in December this year, the next book has been planned and kicked off already which will focus on revolutions in project management, twitter has become a key resource for me. Just look at the fantastic pearls I have identified in the various fields over the last two weeks (abstract) thanks to all the great people I am following.

Perls in Project Management:

1. theplanis : New article: Disaster projects and how to recover them: http://bit.ly/7UAJWF
2. projekt_log : Super Artikel über Festpreisprojekte und Scrum: http://bit.ly/8cqOOQ
3. commsabilities : PMs: practical advice on how to turn projects round using communications http://cli.gs/2QRPj
4. pmstudent :What to Include in Your Project Kickoff Presentation: http://bit.ly/8JWncM #PMOT

Social Media and Project Management:

1. JoachimNiemeier : 12 Adoption Strategies for Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 - http://bit.ly/8HwJgH
2. shim_marom : “Social Media in the work place | quantmleap” ( http://bit.ly/7GY0Pi )
3. tweetmeme : 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010 http://bit.ly/7vKnms

Agile Approaches:

1. zcope : Turning #Storyboards into #Agile #Requirements http://bit.ly/5lYDtp
2. thepmp : Presentation: Principles and Practices of Lean-Agile Software Development http://bit.ly/4th6kj
3. garmahis : The waterfall trap for “agile” projects http://bit.ly/4JlTwi

Specials:

1. garmahis : Nine Awesome iPhone Apps for Business - ReadWriteEnterprise http://bit.ly/4pUwa2
2. chaoskind : Betrachte nicht müßig den Steinhaufen, sondern frage dich, wen du damit bewerfen kannst. (Persisches Sprichwort)
   
3. PhilipGDavis : Tips For Attractive Book Covers http://bit.ly/8egDWJ

Twitter is wonderful and I am looking forward to receive more perls and to contribute to the #pmot network. Thanks to everybody out there.

Of course, in IT projects. This is the common oppinion out there. Of course, business projects are cut as well, but if it comes to planning and delivery you, as the IT project manager, need to deliver double as much for half the money.

KPMG has just released a new article about “Cutting costs on IT projects” and is talking about the fact that the business shouldnt just look into saving money by reducing the head counts in their IT projects but also investigating the quantity of projects.

If any business seriously wants to look at trimming costs from its IT budget, its project portfolio is what it should be looking at, not considering whether a reduction in headcount would do the trick.

and further

I think that many businesses could quickly realize that there are potentially a lot of savings to be made in this area — and that’s because it’s an area which has been previously managed in a less than rigorous fashion. At any point in time, businesses can have a large number of projects ‘in play’, all at various stages of development. The question to ask is just how many of these projects really could be classed as business critical?

And these are the times where the business NEEDS to think about that as there is not enough money to everything you have on your plate. Look at the benefits that are realized by that project, have them defined SMART and measure them post the implementation. Create a culture where projects are not just ticked if they sound good but also bring be the benefits that are expected from them. If some of you have tried hard to implement Enterprise Wide Prioritization of projects, now is the time.

Read the full article here.

Yes, there is a financial crisis, also called the credit crises. How ever there are still some people out there, that say, it hasn’t had an impact on me yet and I don’t know what you are talking about, don’t worry.

You should be worried. Why? Get the coherences here, by the 2nd price winner of the SlideShare contest “Credit Crises”, Konstantyn Spasokukotskiy.

And to put in his words: “Good Luck”.

via Slideshare.net

In Uni we have learned that if you cut out the middle man in your supply chain you are making more profit if you are the product manufacture / supplier and you can provide the product cheaper than your retailers (if you want to). Apple just does it, the price thing,  the other way around.

Today I was after an iPod classic with 120GB (actually just a little over 111GB net) to support my whole library as it has outgrown the older classic with 60GB. I was checking the Apple Online Store and found it there for AUD $ 339. As Apple is pretty strict with their price dictation to resellers I thought I would be able to buy it at officeworks or Harvey Norman for the same price or a little more expensive.

After arriving at Officeworks today I was wondering that the device was actually 11 Dollars cheaper than buying it at the Apple Online Store.

Bottom Line: You get a device cheaper at the retailer that has to buy it from Apple first off, that has to get his margin out of it and has to pay for staff and store retail space and so on. So imagine what apple is making out of it without having these kind of costs. Well done. The Online Store experience for some might be worth the additional buck, not for me.

Boston.com is widely know for their fantastic picture series. This time its about the Booming City Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. After the new Atlantis resort officially opened with a 35 Million AU Dollar ceremony a couple of weeks ago, I doubt that the UAE and Dubai will see something like this in the near future. Large investment projects have been put on hold incl. the 1000 Meter high Schumi-Tower and the surrounding area which would have been a 70 Billion Euro investment. The boom is coming to an end which after 10 years of construction boom and growing from 3.8 Million People in 2004 to 6.5 Million people this year the market is slowing down rapidly. 35% of all available crans worldwide were located in Dubai. So lets enjoy some phantastic pictures …

Even if you haven’t had the chance to attend PMAsia in Singapore earlier this year, the papers are available for download. There are some interesting topics to look at:

• Managing Projects with Overseas Consultants
• Risk Management in Complex Situations
• PRINCE2, Less than Meets the Eye - But Less Can Be More
• Understanding Programs and Projects - Oh, there’s a difference

Have a go and a pick.